Leith.] THE TOLBOOTH WYND. 1 0
marrow alley adjoining the latter, a house bearing
the date 1688 has the two legends, ?Feir the
Lord,? and ?The feir of the Lord is the beginning
of a1 wisdome.?
This part of the town-about the foot of St.
Andrew?s Street-is said to have borne anciently
the name of St. Leonard?s. There the Street
diverges into two alleys : one narrow and gloomy,
which bears the imposing title of Parliament Court ;
and the other called Sheephead Wynd, in which
there remains a very ancient edifice, the ground
floor of which is formed of arches constructed like
those of the old house described in the Kirkgate,
and bearing the date 1579, with the initials D. W.,
M. W. Though small and greatly dilapidated, it
is ornamented with string-courses and mouldings ;
and it was not without some traces of old importance
and grandeur amid its decay and degradation,
until it was entirely altered in 1859.
This house is said to have received the local
name of the Gun Stone, from the circumstance of
a stone cannon ball of considerable size having
been fired into it during some invasion by an
English ship of war. Local tradition avers that
for many years this bullet formed an ornament on
the summit of the square projecting staircase of
the house.
Near Cable?s Wynd, which adjoins this alley, and
between it and King Street, at a spot called
Meeting-house Green, are the relics of a building
formerly used as a place of worship, and although
it does not date farther back than the Revolution
.of 1688, it is oddly enough called ?John Knox?s
Church.?
The records of South Leith parish bear that in
1692, ?? the magistrates of Edinburgh, and members
of the Presbytery there, with a confused company
of the people, entered the church by breaking open
the locks of the doors and putting on new ones,
and so caused guard the church doors with halberts,
rang the bells, and possessed Mr. Wishart of
the church, against which all irregular proceedings
public protests were taken.?
Previous to this he would seem to have officiated
in a kind of chapel-of-ease established near Cable?s
Wynd, by permission of James VII. in 1687.
Soon after the forcible induction recorded, he
came to the church with a guard of halberdiers,
accompanied by the magistrates of Leith, and took
possession of the Session House, compelling the
? prelatick Session ? to hold their meeting in the
adjacent Kantore. More unseemly matters followed,
for in December of the year 1692, when a
meeting was held in South Leith Church to hear
any objections that might be niade against the legal
induction of the Rev. Mr. Wishart, an adherent of
Mr. Kay, ?? one of the prelatick incumbents,? protested
loudly against the whole proceedings.
Upon this, ?Mr. Livingstone, a brewer at the
Craigend (or Calton), rose up, and, in presence of
the Presbytery, did most violently fall upon the
commissioner, and buffeted him and nipped his
cheeks, and had many base expressions to him.?
Others now fell on the luckless commissioner,
who was ultimately thrust into the Tolbooth of
Leith by a magistrate, for daring to do that which
the Presbytery had suggested. Mr. Kay?s session
were next driven out of the Kantore, on the door
of which another lock was placed.
It has been supposed that the ousted episcopal
incumbent formed his adherents into a small congregation,
as he remained long iu Leith, and died
at his house in the Yardheads there so lately as
November, 1719, in the seventieth year of his age.
His successor, tile Rev. Robert Forbes, was minister
of an episcopal chapel in Leith, according to an
anonymous writer, ?? very shortly after Mr: Kay?s
death, and records a baptism as having been performed
? in my room in ye Yardheads.? ?
The history of the Meeting-house near Cable?s
Wynd is rather obscure, but it seems to have been
generally used as a place of worship. The last
occasion was during a visit of John Wesley, the
great founder of Methodism. He was announced
to preach in it; but so grcat a concourse of people
assembled, that the edifice was incapable of accommodating
them, so he addressed the multitude
on the Meeting-house Green. LI house near it,
says The Srofsinan in 1879, is pointed out as ?the
Manse.?
The Tolbooth TVynd is about five hundred an&
fifty feet in length, from where the old signal-tower
stood, at the foot of the Kirkgate, to the site of a
now removed building called Old Babylon, which
stood upon the Shore.
The second old thoroughfare of Leith was undoubtedly
the picturesque Tolbooth Wynd, as the
principal approach to the harbour, after it superseded
the more ancient Burgess Close.
It was down this street that, in the age when
Leith was noted for its dark superstitions and eccentric
inhabitants, the denizens therein, regularly
on stormy nights or those preceding a storm,
heard with horror, at midnight, the thundering
noise of ?the twelve o?clock coach,? a great oatafalque-
looking vehicle, driven by a tall, gaunt figure
without a head, drawn by black horses, also headless,
and supposed to be occupied by a mysterious
female.
Near the eastern end of the wynd there stood
,
228 OLD AND NEW EDINBURGH. [Leith
for many generations an ancient and lofty signaltower,
the summit of which was furnished with
little port-holes, like the loops designed for arrows
or musketry in our old Scottish fortalices, but which
were constructed here for the more peaceable purpose
of watching the merchant ships of the port
as they bore up the Firth of Forth or came to
anchor off the Mussel Cape.
An unusually bold piece of sculpture, in a deep
square panel, was above the archway that led
into the courtyard behind. It was afterwards
placed over the arched entrance leading from the
Tolbooth Wynd to St. Andrew?s Street, and, as
shown by Robertson, bears the date 1678, with
the initials G. R., with two porters carrying a
barrel slung between them, a ship with a lee-board
and the Scottish ensign, an edifice resembling a
mill or two-storeyed granary, and above it a representation
of a curious specimen of mechanical
ingenuity.
The latter consists of a crane, the entire machinery
of which ?was comprised in one large drum or
broad wheel, made to revolve, like the wire cylinder
of a squirrel?s cage, by a poor labourer, who occupied
the quadruped?s place, and clambered up
Sisyphus-like in his endless treadmill. The perspective,
with the grouping and proportions of the
whole composition, formed altogether an amusing
and curious sample of both the mechanical and the
fine arts of the seventeenth century.?
A local writer in 1865 asserts-we know not
upon what authority-that it is the tablet of the
Association of Porters; and adds, that ?had the
man in the wheel missed a step when hoisting up
any heavy article, he must have been sent whirling
round at a speed in nowise tending to his personal
comfort.? Robertson also writes of it as ?The
tablet of the Association of Porters, over the entrance
to the old Sugar House Close.??
About the middle of the wynd, on the south side,
stood the edifice used, until 1812, as the Customhouse
of Leith. It was somewhat quadrangular,
with a general frontage of about a hundred feet,
with a depth of ninety.
Riddle?s Close separated it from the old Tolbooth
and Town Hall, on the same side of the wynd.
It was built in 1565 by the citizens of Leith, though
not without strenuous opposition by their jealous
feudal over-lords the community of Edinburgh, and
was a singularly picturesque example of the old
Tolbooth of a Scottish burgh.
Anxious to please her people in Leith Queen
Mary wrote several letters to the Town Council of
Edinburgh, hoping to soothe the uncompromising
hostility of that body to the measure; and at length
the required effect was produced by the following
epistle, which we have somewhat divested of its
obsolete orthography :-
?? To the Provost, Bailies, and Counsale of Edinburgh
:-
?Forasmeikle as we have sent our requisite
sundry times to you, to permit the inhabitants of
our town of Leith to big and edifie ane hous of
justice within the samyn, and has received no
answer from you, and so the work is steyit and
cessit in your default.
?t Wherefore we charge you, that ye permit our
said town of Leith to big and editie ane said hous
of justice within our said town of Leith, and make
no stop or impediment to them to do the samyn;
for it is our will that the samyn be biggit, and that
ye desist from further molesting them in time
coming, as we will answer to as thereupon.
? Subscribit with our hand at Holyrood House,
the 1st day of March, this year of God 1563.
? MARIE R.?
This mandate had the desired effect, and in two
years the building was completed, as an ornamental
tablet, with the Scottish arms boldly sculptured,
the inscription, and date, ?IN DEFENS, M. R.,
1565,? long informed the passer-by.
This edifice, which measured, as Kincaid states,
sixty feet by forty over the walls, had a large
archway in the centre, above which were two
windows of great. height, elaborately grated. On
the west of it, an outside stair gave access to the
first floor ; on, the east there projected a corbelled
oriel, or turret; lighted by eight windows, all grated.
Three elaborate string mouldings traversed the
polished ashlar.fronr of the building, which nvas surmounted
by an embrasured battlement, and in
one part by a crowstepped gable.
Few prisoners of much note have been incarcerated
here, as its tenants were generally persons
who had been guilty of minor crimes. Perhaps
the most celebrated prisoner it ever contained was
the Scottish Machiavel, ?Maitland of Lethington,
who had fallen into the merciless hands of the
Regent Morton after the capitulation of Edinburgh
Castle in I 5 7 3, and who died, as it was said, ?? in
the d d Roman fashion,? by taking poison to
escape a public execution.
This was on the 9th of July, as Calderwood records,
adding that he lay so long unburied, ?that
the vermin came from his corpse, creeping out
under the door where he died.?
Such an occurrence, it has been remarked, said
little for the sanitary arrangements of the Leith
Tolbooth, and it is to be hoped that it had few
other prisoners on that occasion.
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